Posted
by
Cliff
on Thursday September 04, 2003 @01:29AM
from the high-wow-factor dept.

An anonymous reader asks: "I was doing my usual site browsing, and I stumbled onto this thread about the best game trailers at PCSynapse.com. It made me really think about how important it is for a company to make a good, early impression on potential videogame buyers, and give people something to anticipate. What do you say your favorite non-interactive game trailers of all time are?"

I remember downloading shakey cam footage of the "Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty" trailer for the PS2 years ago, looked amazing, better than any PC games at the time. It was as good a trailer as some action movies.

I also remember the semi-famous "Into the Shadows" demo from a long time ago. The game was never finished but the demo was sweet, showed skeletons moving around casting multiple shadows on the floor, on a Pentium 90 with no 3d card.

The trailer for the remixed game "Metal Gear Substance" was awesome. It had all these words that kept morphing together: Subliminal, Subvert, Subordinate, Subsist... until finaly morphing into "Substance".

Nevermind the incredible "WTF" scenes like Snake on a skateboard, Meryll alive and the giant soldiers.

And the tagline: The fall, Metal Gear sheds its skin and reveals its SUBSTANCE.

Its a somewhat interesting question.....but come on....this isn't news....this is posting to slashdot a brief thread from some messageboard. I'm not trying to troll here, but I'm just saying, there's FIVE FRIGGIN POSTS IN THE THREAD. Is that news? Gaw...o well, got karma to burn if the mods are feeling vindictive tonight.

What I really really hate is when you see 'screenshots' or sequences on TV which are advertising a game, and they're things you'd NEVER see during actual gameplay.

When I see a game ad, I want to see what it's like from the perspective of playing it. Not some dumb raycasted promotional graphic that looks NOTHING like the game. Gran Turismo's screenshots are guilty of this. Nearly all of them are 'external' views. Who uses the external views while driving? I want to see what the graphics quality is like from

What's the difference if it's still rendered in the game engine, though? The replay scenes in GT3 are still rendered by the game engine.

The only difference is the HUD and, in the case of GT, the interior of the cars. On racing games I have a tendency to turn off the interior view. In FPS games how much modification I do to the HUD is dependant on how it looks, but if something really bugs me I'll change it, rather than suffering with it, and seeing it beforehand isn't really going to change that.

The difference is the engine cant always keep up. I've seen some absolutely stunning renders of counterstrike and natural selection models that look nothing like they do ingame, even with all the detail settings cranked up.

Then that's a different situation: using content (or renders of content) that are not used in the game itself. All of the GT3 stuff I've seen is either the intro footage (which obviously is not the game engine) or shots of in-game rendering, which uses the same content (or older content in some cases, which usually looks worse) as the game itself.

Showing off models as they were rendered before putting them into the game and finding out that the game couldn't handle it, and trying to pass them off as in-gam

Oni, a much underrated game developed by Bungie (who, of course, went on to write Halo) had a great trailer. All the scenes were from actual gameplay (or at least the engine) with hints at the plot, fight scenes, gunplay...

A Dark Future... An Uncertain Past... No one left to trust

Unfortunately I can't find a download link which still works in general, but FilePlanet subscribers may have luck via http://www.3dactionplanet.com/oni/files/movies.sht ml

American McGee's Alice. The trailer was all CG rendered FMV which didn't actually match scenes from the game -- but it was very cinematic, stylishly done and pretty exciting.

And it alone was enough to land a potential movie deal with Wes Craven, which just goes to show...

The nice thing is that even if the trailer didn't show game footage, the game maintained the atmosphere of the trailer -- you can't accuse them of lying about the experience, you just got a different experience in the same exact vein. Goo

Maybe it was the years of heavy anticipation of an unofficial Wasteland sequel, but the original Fallout trailer left me near tears.

It begins with the vinyl crooning of a melancholy oldie from the Ink Spots over a scratchy black and white retro-future newsreel. An ad for an atomic-powered car, then a shot of a soldier in power armor kicking a man on the street, filling him full of lead, then waving to the camera.

The perspective pulls back to reveal a boxy old console television, and as the music starts t

The trailer I always thought was best wasn't actually an "official" trailer, but a short movie [bungie.org] put together by a fan of the Oni [bungie.org] game (from Bungie [bungie.org]). It's made entirely of movie captures from the game and has a very fitting soundtrack. Being made by a fan, it captures the spirit of the game like few trailers our there ever did for their rspective games.

With the marines descending into an alien artifact, then get ambushed, then the Master Chief shows up and kicks ass. It had an interesting little storyline, showed off some cool effects, and got me interested in playing the game.

That was the last good adventure I played, and a very good one indeed.
I even played the localised (Brazilian) version, and it was surprisingly good (I usually prefer the original versinos).
The jazz soundtrack was very good also. I still have some/musicas/jazz/Grim\ Fandango/*.mp3

The problem I have with trailers for so many PC and console games is that they often don't show any actual gameplay. Usually it's just animation rendered outside of the game engine that relates to the storyline, which for me is not why I buy games.

A good storyline is great, but for any game I'm gonna buy, I've gotta be interested in the gameplay. Often you can't determine whether that's any good without a demo or a rental.

While these are not a trailer per say, the Red vs. Blue Pseudo-Parody Screening of the Halo2 trailer as an intelligence release about the upcoming war as well as the new style of armor that Master Chief wears was probably the best trailer ever, IMO.

How about Command & Conquer 2: Tiberian Sun? There was a trailer that played at the end of the 1995 version of Command & Conquer (Tiberian Dawn, the original) that raised hopes so high (Westwood didn't help by hyping the game like a frenzied dog) that the game was an abject failure by the (impossible, I say) standards everyone in the community had. As a footnote, the *seen* (it was a commercial success) of C&C2 killed the C&C community, I think.

Not that this would qualify as a classic trailer, but I just downloaded the trailer for URU: Ages of Myst [uruobsession.com] and found it very impressive, especially considering the text at the beginning, which informs you that the entire trailer was made using the game engine...no pre-rendered images.